Local search sites currently available on the Internet can be used to search for businesses that are geographically close to a user-identified location, e.g., close to a user's home address. To add value to the search results, local search sites have also attempted to provide ratings or rankings of such businesses. However, the common methods for rating businesses have not been completely adequate.
One rating method relies on customer reviews of the businesses. This method requires customers to manually enter a review of or otherwise rate businesses, e.g., on a scale from 1 to 5. This “business review” method typically fails to provide a sufficient number of ratings to accurately reflect the community's opinion of businesses and often fails to provide any ratings or reviews at all for many businesses. One of the reasons for the shortage of reviews is that customers have little incentive to rate or review businesses, so many businesses go unranked.
Another rating method rates a business by counting the number of hyperlinks that lead to the business' website. The more links to a business' website, the higher the business is rated or ranked. A shortcoming of this approach is that many small businesses do not have websites and therefore a count of links to the business' website is not possible. Further, it is not clear whether a large number of links indicates a well operated business or an Internet-savvy business.
In view of the shortcomings of existing technology, systems and methods for rating businesses are sought that do not require users to spend time manually reviewing a business and do not depend on a business to be Internet-savvy or on there being hyperlinks to a business' website. These systems and methods should still able to rank a wide variety of businesses across many categories.